Super Heroes

When the new Superman movie by DC Comics/Warner Brothers/Christopher Nolan/Zack Snyder, “Man of Steel”, was released in 2013 I felt about it the way many comic fans felt about it: the movie was nice to look at, but it sure wasn’t Superman. The Superman I know wasn’t humorless. He protected the people. And he surely didn’t kill anyone, no matter the reason why! My Superman was bright, colorful, and happy. He was the “big blue boy scout” that rescued kittens from trees and fooled his friends by wearing a simple pair of glasses. This movie did not do that character justice at all. And in the years since it was released Man of Steel has become a hotly debated film among those that liked it and those that thought it fell short. But recently a few things have happened that have allowed me to view it in a new light, one that ends up being much more favorable to this depiction of Clark Kent. And so this is my attempt to reevaluate the movie, and compare it to both the source material and figure out its place in today’s cinematic landscape.

Now, although I didn’t love Man of Steel, I didn’t hate it. I just found it very wrong-headed. I have had friends who have defended it from day one, but I could never quite seem to understand their point of view. But a few months ago I watched it again for the first time since seeing it in the theater, this time with my mother who enjoys all sorts of genre films. And not having the baggage of knowing the comic backstories, or clear memories of the Richard Donner/ Christopher Reeve movie from 1978, she enjoyed it quite a bit. And seeing her enjoyment made enjoy it a bit more, too. And it raised some questions in my brain that have bubbled up sporadically since then; why did this movie seem to be a rorschach test for those watching it? Which brings us to this past month, which saw the release of the full trailer for the next film in WB’s DC Comics cycle: Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. Not a sequel to Man of Steel, but instead a continuation of a larger story, the trailer seems to confirm that many of the events people had trouble with in the earlier film would actually be addressed. And might even retroactively color the first film, having shown some of those same events again from a new perspective. And finally, I watched the very thorough documentary “The Death of Superman Lives”, which gives an exhaustive look at what might have been had the Tim Burton/Nicolas Cage Superman movie been made in 1998.

All of these things led me to rewatch Man of Steel again today. And it was almost like seeing it for the first time: I noticed many things that on first viewing didn’t register. So here we go! But first, two things: one, I can’t discuss this without tons of spoilers, so if you haven’t seen the movie go watch it and come back. And two, I can’t believe that the interpretation of the film that I’m going to detail and all of the events in it were not very purposefully put there by director Zack Snyder and the rest of the DC braintrust. I don’t believe any of it was an accident, even if it’s not clearly spelled out.

I started writing a recap here but it’s so convoluted I’ll instead point you to this one if you need a refresher on the plot. In general, the major complaint is that based on his behavior in this film, this IS NOT Superman. And for the most part, they’re right! He is not “Superman”. He is Clark Kent. Even though this is incredibly self-evident, even though the filmmakers said this over and over, it really did not sink in for me until this viewing: “Superman” is not in this movie until the very end. This is not a film about the character you love from the comics, it isn’t a follow-up to any incarnation you’ve seen before. It’s right there in the title: MAN of Steel. It’s a story about how a man finds himself. He never calls himself Superman and in fact no one addresses him as “Superman” directly. This entire movie is the lead up to him becoming “Superman” and all that entails. You may think I’m just playing with semantics here but read on. It’s almost become tradition that every reboot begins with a retelling of the hero’s origin story. At first glance, Man of Steel is no different. But I would call this almost a coming of age movie over an origin story. True, we see scenes of Clark Kent exploring his powers, growing up, and his first formative “adventure”. But we really don’t see him “get” his powers. The movie is set mostly in present day with a grown Clark who has not yet taken on any of the trappings of a superhero. And the flashbacks scattered throughout the film are there to explain his mind and motivations, not his powers.

One thing everyone can agree on is that Man of Steel is a reboot. But I haven’t seen it mentioned what it’s a reboot of, which is the very idea of a cinematic Superman. It’s funny to think of it, but Batman has been nothing but a reboot of the character every time he has appeared in movies and on TV. From the Adam West version to Batman ’89 to The Animated Series to Schumacher’s day-glo insanity to Nolan’s hyper real Batman Trilogy, every incarnation of the character has been a new one and not based directly on the comics in almost any way. These movies take TONS of liberties with every facet of the character and villains and audience never bat an eye. Ironically, the upcoming Ben Affleck version [footnote] Interestingly, it looks like Affleck has taken over much of the reigns in how Batman will be portrayed from now on, not Snyder. [/footnote] looks to be the most faithful version to the comics that we’ve seen yet. (Side-note: I know many people will claim that Batman: The Animated Series was faithful to the comics, but it’s only faithful in distilling the spirit of the character rather than any specifics in look or plot from any specific comic timeframe). But every version of Superman so far actually takes it’s cues from the Golden and Silver age comics. It can be argued that Lois and Clark is more like the 1980s comics, but only in that Clark isn’t portrayed as a wimp. (Smallville isn’t like any of the previous incarnations, true, but then, he’s not “Superman” in that one either, is he?) And the end-all, be-all for Superman in the public consciousness is Donner’s Superman: The Motion Picture.

So the basics that people have in mind when they think of Superman have been re-enforced over and over for decades, and when that basic idea is confronted with something new people tended to react by claiming that “they got it wrong”. And again, I’ll point out that I was also in that camp! But the reality is that in comics Superman has been reinvented time and time again. Unlike Spider-Man, or Batman, Superman’s powers actually evolved over time. His origin changed over and over (and over and over again to this day!) Sure, the core idea always survived: Krypton explodes, baby rockets to Earth, grows up to be Superman, meets Lois Lane. But that’s it. His parents, occupation, powers, childhood…most of the details have changed over time. And that core is what Man of Steel has kept, leaving the rest of the details to be filled in anew.

What muddies the water a bit is that writers Zack Snyder and David Goyer are too in love with comics history to resist putting in multiple nods to the past and repurposing elements, rather than creating new ones. So it can indeed be interpreted as “getting it wrong” when you make “Jimmy Olsen” into “Jenny Olsen”, but it’s only wrong if it was meant to be Jimmy Olsen in the first place. These nods run the gamut of classic stories, from a brief shout-out to The Dark Knight Returns (don’t worry fans, Snyder is just getting started with that book) to bits from Birthright, Superman: Earth One, and various other tales, the one story that really informs this new reboot is the one big reboot of comic Superman: John Byrne’s 1986 The Man Of Steel mini-series and subsequent comic run. People forget that John Byrne’s reboot not only removed the convoluted history of the character, but was a shift in how Superman was portrayed and perceived by the populace of the DC universe. In a drastic change from the staid Boy Scout that came before, Byrne kept Superman’s moral compass but made significant modifications to everything else: He is now the sole survivor of Krypton, which has become a sterile, science based society that “grows” their children, Clark’s parents were now alive, he reveled in the use of his powers as Clark Kent, he didn’t become Superman until adulthood (his years as Superboy were wiped away entirely), the rocket that brought him to Earth still exists, he is less powerful, Lex Luthor is a powerful businessman instead of a scientist, Jor-El appears to Clark in adulthood as an interactive hologram to tell him where he comes from, and most importantly, Superman will face a genocidal General Zod that can only be stopped by killing him.

You can see the elements that Goyer and Snyder picked up for their version of Man of Steel. (Here’s a detailed rundown of the comic influences.) But they made one major deviation, one thing that would shape the entire film, and the continuity going forward: their Jonathan and Martha Kent WERE NOT like any incarnation of the adopted parents of Superman we had ever seen. This change is what is going to shape the movie. This is why he is only “Clark Kent” in the movie, and not “Superman”. It’s pretty much a constant throughout the history of the character that states Superman is the “boy scout” that he is because of his good upbringing in the heartland of America. It’s why there was an uproar a few years back when he seemed to renounce his American citizenship in the comics. What Man of Steel posits is that in a grounded telling of this tale, Jonathan & Martha Kent would be terrified of what would happen to their boy if people found out about him in this day of YouTube and Social Media. So the underlying lesson they impart to Clark isn’t “be a hero”, it’s “be scared”. I know, I know. That’s NOT what Jonathan Kent would do!! Except Jonathan Kent is an old man. He died when Clark was a child. He was a passerby that turned the baby over to an orphanage. He’s the one who designed Superman’s “S-Shield”. Actually, there is no one “Jonathan Kent”, there are only many versions of that character throughout the years. And this is just the latest one.

It’s a bold choice, though. I think part of why this was so poorly received is that too much of the Kents’ motivations are left as subtext instead of text. We don’t know what they are thinking, as most of their scenes are interaction with Clark due to the flashback structure of the film. This is really a fault of the entire film: there is something to be said for “show, not tell”, but when it’s not artfully done you need to make sure the idea comes across. Too much of the movie is spent detailing Zod’s motivation instead of Clark, not to mention many of the other characters. There are hardly any conversations in the film between two characters that are not exposition or counterpoints to an action scene. A scene between Jonathan and Martha debating whether or not they are doing the right thing in treating Clark like veal would go a long way to rationalizing their choices (and you can even have little Clark eavesdropping if you need to justify the inclusion in a flashback). These kind of connection scenes are sorely missed throughout the movie. And it’s pretty clear that Jonathan might never have told Clark where they found him; he only does so in reaction to Clark asking more or less if God was punishing him.

As is, their decision turns the character of Clark away from every traditional telling of his origin. He grows up apparently friendless, with his knee-jerk reaction to walk away from any conflict. He’s wandering aimlessly, trying to figure out where he fits in. This would be a good place for another scene of characterization; if we saw him at least keeping a journal during this time it would make the abrupt transition to reporter later easier to swallow. (Side-note: this type of thing is often described as making the movie more “realistic”, but the fact is that there is nothing remotely realistic about any genre film. I prefer saying that it’s a grounded or serious choice, instead.) So the entire movie is not “Superman’s first adventure”, but instead Clark’s journey to get to a place where he becomes Superman. He is not perfect. He is not the “boy scout” yet. He steals clothes, destroys property. He is saving people, but mainly because he’s in the right place at the right time. Most Superman origins show his reveal to the world because he’s making a dramatic save in public (helicopter, plane, space shuttle), but in Man of Steel he is called out into the open by the villain and has no choice.

His relationship to Krypton is interesting, too. The entire time he’s growing up, he’s an outsider. Even if he’s not sure he’s an actual alien, he surely isn’t fully human. When he finds the buried ship and learns his origins from Jor-El is about the part in the movie that you start see him smile from time to time. And then he meets Lois and makes a friend. The argument that “Superman” wouldn’t cause so much destruction and not try to protect people is true as these events seem to be what creates Superman in this reality. Without Jonathan guiding him to do these things, Clark hasn’t quite figured it out yet. And it’s obvious that while he loves his parents, he’s also been secretly hoping to find his “real parents” the entire time. One of my favorite scenes in the movie is the turning point of him not really being in the game until Zod threatens his mother. I think it solidifies and clarifies in his mind that he is choosing Earth, not the thing he thought he had been searching for his whole life. Again, these ideas are all under the surface. I wish they had given the script another pass. But there are interesting ideas in there. And they drop hints of a larger history: the empty life pod on the ancient Kryptonian ship, Jor-El’s helper robots that are straight out of Byrne’s comics, and Superman’s relationship with the military, which we’ve never really seen before.

One of the most interesting things is that the traditional version of Jonathan Kent IS in this movie: it’s Jor-El. Jor-El is the one who has hopes and aspirations of Kal as a hero for Earth. He’s the one who tells Kal to protect them, and to be a better ideal. He gives Kal his iconic uniform. Goyer and Snyder even lift some of Jor-El’s speeches verbatim from the comics. And it’s through Jor-El’s interaction with Clark and his sacrifices that show Clark how to be that hero. Looked at it another way, for the first half of the movie Clark is a literal alien on Earth, but in the last half (after Jor-El shows him how to leave Zod’s ship) he embraces his humanity and starts on the journey to fulfilling his destiny as a hero. One thing that opened my eyes to this interpretation was watching Jon Schnepp’s fascinating doc on the aborted “Superman Lives”. Much is made over Tim Burton and Nicolas Cage’s view of Superman as the ultimate outsider, one who feels like an alien all the time. While not as extreme as Cage’s performance would have been, Cavill’s traditional look overshadows this characterization in Man of Steel. We see “Superman” so feel the disconnect. But imagine Nic Cage in the same role as written, and it becomes clearer. With Cavill, instead of quirky we get taciturn. But he is still removed from humanity until pushed by Zod and embraced by Lois. By the end of the movie, he’s learning and adapting to his new role. He doesn’t prevent the mass destruction that happens because he’s trying to figure out what to do. He’s not yet Superman, but he’s getting there. Watching the trailers for Batman v. Superman, you can see he’s wrestling with the repercussions, too.

Now, even with this new point of view, the movie is far from perfect. There are million tiny things to nitpick, but others have done that better than I will. And Goyer and Snyder tend to want to have their cake and eat it too; nowhere is this more evident than the closing scenes of Clark magically being given a job at the Daily Planet when we’ve never seen any evidence that he’s a writer or that he even went to college. In the comics and earlier films, his job as a reporter many exists to get him close to Lois. But she knows who he is in Man of Steel (another deviation that I completely agree with), so there is no real reason to place him there. Not to mention there is no way that the Planet would have already been rebuilt or that Metropolis’ streets would be cleaned up. It’s these little lapses that make the big ones harder to ignore. And Man of Steel has two really big missteps: Jonathan Kent’s demise and the Killing of Zod.

On the face of it, I don’t have a problem with the idea of either event. But the execution is botched so much that it threatens to derail Clark’s characterization and is part of what had led to the outcry against the movie. Jonathan Kent dying is nothing new. In fact, Donner’s 1978 movie set the bar for this, with an elegant script and performance by Glenn Ford that hammered home both the concept that Clark needs to be bigger than himself and than he is not a God, and can’t save everyone. But the ludicrous concept of a tornado appearing on a sunny day, exactly over their location, with the “Dog Ex Machina” keeping Jonathan at the car is just a convoluted mess. It definitely feels like Snyder’s enthusiasm for spectacle overweighed the dramatic potential. A better scenario would have been Pa Kent getting in a simple car wreck with Clark in the car and a crowd of people around. Then he could use his dying breath to forbid Clark lifting the car off him and getting him to the hospital. It would prove the same point and have a greater emotional impact. But as is in the film it is too unrealistic a scenario and one that it wouldn’t even take super powers to solve!

The killing of Zod is another thing that doesn’t make much sense as presented. I don’t have a problem with Superman killing in the right circumstance (although I don’t think they needed to shoehorn it into this movie) and there was a precedence in the comic (Side-note: in the comic his guilt was so extreme it drove Superman into multiple personalities and eventual exile in space). However, Clark kills Zod because he feels like he doesn’t have a choice since Zod won’t stop his rampage and is about to kill a family with his heat vision. That technically should follow his eyes, not his head. So (as many have said before) Clark shouldn’t be able to prevent the family’s death just by holding Zod’s head. But whatever. They also have a discussion in the middle of it, after apparently killing hundreds by knocking down half of Metropolis. So here’s where they try to play it both ways, and maybe this was by mandate of WB or Nolan, but as it’s shown in the movie, we never actually see Zod kill anyone. We DO see Clark snap his neck, though. Is it murder if they’re only thinking about a crime? This is what muddies the argument. Plainly put, Zod should have been shown killing that family. And another one, and another…SNAP! No discussion, just an agonized choice that had to be made. And it should be very clear that Clark is also making the choice that he will be the only Kryptonian, right after finally finding his people. Along those lines, we should have seen the consequences of that massive destruction. There is not a single body, and people are running away as the cars are being crushed by a “gravity wave”. Jenny Olsen should have died. Heck, it would have made a huge impact if Ma Kent had been killed by Zod, and shown Clark why he didn’t have any options. As is, Colonel Hardy and Dr. Hamilton might be dead, or might be in the Phantom Zone. The movie was pretty vague about all that.

All that said, I’m now on board with this DC cinematic universe. Man of Steel had some winning performances, and as far as look goes you’d be hard pressed to find a better Superman than Henry Cavill. One thing the movie was was consistent in its viewpoint, and Batman v. Superman only looks like more of the same. And I’m ok with that…now.

If you’ve bought action figures from Mattel over the past few years, you know that they have had some issues in the manufacturing of your favorite DC Comics characters. But the one that really puzzles me is how often the colors of the final product do not match the paint masters or even the designs as seen in the comics.

Sure, they are the right color, per se. But they are not the right value of that color. And this should be a very simple process: you get a paint master, you match each base color to a Pantone guide, you figure out which parts are molded plastic and which are painted, you send these numbers off to the factory in China, and eventually you should get back some color chips that show the actual plastic that will be used, and what the base plastic looks like painted. At this point you double check the samples against your original Pantone numbers AND the paint master. If they deviant, tweak them and send for new chips. This seems like a pain, but the manufacturing window is long enough that you should be able to handle at least 2-3 rounds of tweaks if necessary.But for some reason, what we see in the prototypes IS NOT what we get.

Case in point is the Superman/Brainiac 2-pack shown at NYCC 2011. The sculpts are great, but the green on the classic Brainiac (seen on the left) is waaaaaay too blue, and waaaay too dark. In all the original comics he was more of an olive shade of green. See the original comic cover at right, and my quick photoshop mockup above of what I think it should be (Note: this cover was Brainiac’s first appearance, and the only one where his boots were pink and not white). I just don’t understand going to the trouble of making these characters and not going all the way to get them right. Amazingly, Mattel actually made his boots and gloves white; their usual process is to treat all white costumes as grey for some reason. It’s a habit that is beyond frustrating, when there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the shade of grey or any purpose in not making the plastic at least off-white. Take a look at a sampling of Mattel DC characters next to a real white Hasbro Stormtrooper figure.
Red Hood, Hawk, Stormtrooper, Power Girl, Captain Cold

And speaking of color, check out the Superman on the right in the pic above, too. If they had to make yet another Superman (albeit one with short hair with the new body) why not adjust the color on him, too, and give us a classic Superman in the shade of blue that the old comics used? The shade of blue that Christopher Reeve wore in the Superman movies? The shade of blue that was used for the Super Powers Superman figure? You get the picture. Fans don’t want to feel screwed with rebuying the same character, so why not do everything you can to make it feel different?

How does something like this happen? I’ll tell you how: it’s the fallacy of memory. It’s when someone looks at an object and their memory tells them that it is correct because it has all of the right symbols, even if the details don’t match up. This happened throughout the licensing process, but it’s something that is incredibly frustrating to me, as at any point in the process any single person could stop it before it is too late to catch. And make no mistake, once it costs money to change something it’s too late. But before that stage, in the planning stage, in the design stage, in the approvals stage…it’s not too late. But we see these mistakes happen over and over, and not just with the colors. And not just Mattel, to be fair! But Mattel definitely is a repeat offender.

Scott McCloud’s explanation of symbols in comics

So why do people rely on their memory, rather than using detailed reference materials to guide them? Well, in the decade I spent in the manufacturing world I found the simplest answer to be that they just don’t realize that their memory isn’t exact. Take a look at the image at the top of this article of the many Superman iterations over the years. If someone not familiar with each version was to be shown these images separately over time, the most common response when asked about the details would be that “it’s Superman” and that they’re all more or less than same. And when you’re talking about the symbols that make up the character “Superman”, they aren’t wrong: they all have his dark hair, they’re all Caucasian, the suit is blue with red trunks, cape, and boots, they all have his “S-Shield” on his chest. But every single “S-Shield” is different, the blues are different values, the reds are too, the hairstyles are different and so on. But if you ignore the details and just get the symbols right, anyone would be able to tell you that it is Superman. And that’s the problem for pretty much any character that you haven’t actually studied: Our memory remembers the symbols, but not necessarily the actual representation. I’m going to be mentioning symbols a lot in this article, so click on the image at right to recognize the importance they play in culture. Note: you can do a lot with just symbols! 1

Getting back to Superman, you can see how getting the symbols right but not the details wasn’t an issue when a toy line might only have ONE Superman figure in it. The symbols were all you needed to worry about for a mom or kid to recognize the character. But as the collector base grew in the past two decades to be the main force pouring the sales, being faithful to the details and the symbols is now paramount. Case in point: Mattel continually recycled the same Superman figure without even a revised paint job, often pairing it with a new or revised character. This is fine for a child buying his first Superman figure, but for long time collectors it forced them into purchasing the same one over and over. Worst still, NOT purchasing it, leading to lost sales and consumer dissatisfaction. The easiest way to rectify the situation would be be to simply repaint the figure, chaining the details to match the different iterations that have existing throughput Superman’s 75 year history. If they could replace the head, that would be all to the better! But even with paint alone, all of the mock-ups below would be achievable. It’s just one more area where a little bit more time spent planning might have extended the life of the line even further.

To be honest, these issues would be minor if these figures were still selling for $6 or $7 each. But with the recession and the price of oil skyrocketing in the past ten years, the cost of one mass retail figure has reached the level that boutique toys are at, but without the commiserate jump in quality. In fact, quality seems to have gone downhill in the same timeframe, no doubt due to trying to keep the same profit margin in the face of decreased sales. It’s even worse when you couple the decline in quality with poor decisions on character choices that were made solely to recoup Mattel’s development costs at the expense of collectors. And that’s the kind of “tone deaf” decision making that makes me hate giving Mattel any money. Unlike the majority of toy companies in the past, most Mattel brand managers come from marketing/copywriting, and I think have almost no judgement for manufacturing at all. QC nightmares notwithstanding, it doesn’t seem like any figures ever get sent back for quality modifications, whether it be color correction, making things more on-model, or just getting details right. That they make collectors pre-buy subscriptions online since the fall of the retail lines is really disappointing as a collector.

Mattel’s Watchmen subscription line

As a case in point, The Watchmen subscription really, really made me angry. Based on the seminal comic series from 1985, collectors have been wanting a comic-based line of merchandise for nearly 30 years. And for what will most likely be the ONLY comic version we will ever get of these characters, Mattel really did a poor job. Again, I understand the constrictions of not having much budget (because Mattel sucks every drop of profit margin out of everything; NECA could do wonders with the same money. But I digress…), so the scale problems, reuse of existing bodies, etc. are all understandable. Less understandable (and this applies to all DC subs) are the expenses put toward packaging instead of the figures, but we know Mattel loves it’s packaging so that’s a losing battle.

Let me get some positives out of the way: at least they all have new heads. And Silk Spectre and Nite Owl are acceptable. The others, though, are total train wrecks when compared with the source material. Looking at the finished products, it comes back to “the fallacy of memory” when these were being created. And likewise, all of the people defending these must be going off their memory of what these characters look like. Because they don’t look like they’re supposed to. The bottom line is that memory is fine for symbols, but for the details you have to study actual reference materials and continuously compare your product to the source. No matter how sharp you think you are, your memory will fool you at every step of the way. Just look at that picture up there: you can easily tell who these characters are, sure. But for $35 each with shipping, these deserved to be a lot better than the knock-offs in dollar stores.

Before I get into specifics, I do want to address the defenders: I’ve had a few people tell me “I don’t have a problem with it” or “it looks fine to me”. I get that. But would you really choose the wrong version over one that was on-model? Because a good sculpt costs the same budget -wise as a bad sculpt. It just takes work on the Brand Manager’s part to make sure it’s right. And again, I think if you’re not used to having a critical eye on these things it’s easy to see the symbols of Rorschach (spots on mask, wearing fedora) and take that to mean that it matches your memory. And Watchmen of all things have a very specific style, by a singular artist (Dave Gibbons) who didn’t really deviate in how he drew them (unlike, say, Jim Lee who changes things from panel to panel). Note: I’m ignoring the recent “Before Watchmen” comic series, as it’s so new and so all over the map it doesn’t really impact most fans’ idea of what these guys look like.

So, Rorschach: again, his scale is off, but body re-use dictated that so it is what it is. But the head is the wrong shape entirely, the hat is completely off, and his facial pattern look to be made up by Mattel. I went through the whole trade and couldn’t find that pattern anywhere. It looks off from what Gibbons designed, and I get the feeling it outlines his nose with the negative space to make the tampo easier. It doesn’t help that each one I’ve seen has the tampo printing slightly off-center and crooked, a QC problem that could have been easily corrected when they got the first samples back from the factory. If you look at the above image, you can really see how incredibly off this is. I made a quick photoshop mockup of the production figure for comparison. As an aside, every place I’ve worked does these when we get pics of sculpts in, to make corrections and demonstrate what is off for the factory to correct. I have a feeling Mattel only does this for engineering, not aesthetics.

Dr. Manhattan has other issues. His head is basically a generic blue bald guy. Gibbons drew him as being an ideal physical from, so his face is quite muscular and angular. The 4H sculpt has softer features, and the geometry is fairly off, especially the eye area. But even so, I can accept what they sculpted more than I can Rorschach. But then Mattel did a tremendously bad job in manufacturing that sculpt; just look at how misshapen that head is! And to cap it off, the eye deco is even farther off than the 4H paint master AND it goes incredibly soft, not even fully covering painted areas. Couple that with the short stature, bad wrist molding (again, compare it to a shot of the 4H sculpt), and skinny neck, and Mattel really messed up what should have been the easiest figure to produce. (I included a shot of the never produced Tim Bruckner sculpt, to show that even that isn’t quite right, although the overall sculpts for those figures were very good in general.)

To me, this is the same thing as movie likenesses, but people get much more bent out of shape of a movie figure is off-model than a comic or animation figure, probably because their memory of Harrison Ford’s features is pretty strong (but unlike an actor their memory of a comic character is mostly based on those pesky symbols, not details. For example, this new movie Spider-Man costume is the first one to get the webs on his face right. But they were always in a similar pattern, so most people didn’t see them as “wrong”. Again, I digress… But it’s all relative. Most consumers would be more upset over a Han Solo or Batman ’66 likeness being off than a Robert Forster Black Hole figure. Or even a Luke vs Wedge figures. We’re just very familiar with certain actors. The new Brad Pitt World War Z figure is no worse than these Watchmen, but boy did everyone hone in on that likeness!

And that’s why it’s such a disappointment to be collecting Mattel toys. Nearly $30 a piece nets us figures that have lower quality than $10 retail figures. And a big chunk of the problems could be corrected for the same cost! Every place I’ve worked, the mantra was you don’t go home until it’s right. Yes, things do happen. But it’s so institutionalized at Mattel, and for the “biggest toy company in the world” it should be the exception, not the rule. But they are so driven by marketing and selling/branding rather than producing quality product it makes me insane. That thinking serves Barbie and Hot Wheels well, where the product lines are built on endless variations of the same thing but it’s murder for unique figures. Everything they do is built around a sales gimmick, not to mention the custom packaging for such un-custom figures. For toys on such a limited budget, I wonder what the cost is to go to an outside artist? Especially since all the artwork is on the back of the package, and it’s all pre-sold, so illustrations do nothing to entice purchase at shelf (which is the point of fun packaging!)

Hasbro’s Star Wars Black 6″ line.

You might think at this point that I’m trying to make an example solely out of Mattel here. But the truth is that when your company gets to a certain size a lot of the attention to detail tends to fall away while looking at the bigger marketing picture. So now it’s Hasbro’s turn in the spotlight, specifically shining on their current “Star Wars Black” 6″ toy line. For this being the “ultimate” Star Wars line and all, it’s pretty tough not to be disappointed in a few of them, starting with R2D2. He’s just terrible, and for a character that is all hard geometry and has multiple perfect CG models floating around (not to mention the actual digital model from Lucasfilm!) it’s just stupid for his sculpt to be off at all. It must be said, however, at a lower price point than Mattel’s figures Hasbro gives us all-new sculpts and plenty of detail work. The intent is clearly there, it’s the execution that is off on some of these. And I’m only focusing on those that fall short; other figures like Boba Fett, Luke X-Wing, Stormtrooper, etc., are excellent.

Brief rundown of what irks me: Most importantly, the head is the wrong shape. It’s too bulbous. The body is slightly too squat. The “face” details have some issues, as the outer “eye” shape is off and too flat and the eye itself is too big and needs to be off center. A lot of the sculpted details are just a bit wrong (see the shapes of the body vents). The blue shapes on his torso are wrong and too small. Let’s take a look at a photo comparison:

Again, at a glance this looks like R2D2 should. But it’s almost like they went completely off of memory on this guy, albeit a decent enough memory. The parts are there, but all just off enough. His shoulders and legs are too thin, and a bit out of proportion. His ankles are way too thin (the side cylinders are too small and in the wrong place). Mine has one leg longer than the other, so he leans slightly (I stole Daniel’s pic for the comparison, so the one below is not mine). His feet are off model, and the inner feet pieces too small. I think that even though the blue parts are probably the correct color, on the actual prop they are metallic and show up much brighter in direct light and IMO could have been cheated to be lighter (or better yet, metallic paint!).

All of these things would be minor nitpicks that I could ignore if there was just a couple. But all together they annoy the heck out of me for something that was digitally sculpted and should have been near perfect. The head shape really bothers me most of all; I could ignore the rest if that was right. Well, that and the fact that he’s crazy small. Let’s take a look at how tall he should be in a still from the end of The Empire Strikes Back:

You can see he’s a pretty good size, about to Luke’s mid-chest. As you can see in the group shot up above, the Hasbro R2D2 barely comes up to Luke’s hips. Fortunately, unlike with the Mattel figures, if you put in a bit of work a lot of the problems can be solved. And even better, Bandai Japan actually is releasing model kits in the same scale as the Hasbro figures that are absolutely perfect (OK, R2’s feet are a bit too big, but still). The Japanese in general tend to put a lot more effort in their consumer products, and these are no different. The main drawback is that they are actual model kits and do take some time putting them together, along with painting them. And they are kind of light, being hollow and all. But the price isn’t too far off from the Hasbro figures. Check out the Hasbro R2 next to the Bandai one and a Bandai C-3P0, who has yet to be produced by Hasbro. (Side note: I painted the R2 kind of dirty as the only shots that he’s totally clean like the Hasbro version are at the very end of Star Wars. But the model comes in a clean state if one is so inclined.)

The figure that needed the most work (so far) is another one that makes you shake your head that they got so wrong: Darth Vader. It’s hard to know where to begin on how bad their Vader is: misshapen helmet/faceplate, overall bad proportions, silver chain attached to his cape, cape itself bad…it’s really a mess. Again, you can easily tell it’s Vader. But boy did they not pay attention to the details on this guy! To be fair, all three original movies (and the one prequel appearance) had different Vader costumes, with slight variations. Ostensibly, the Hasbro one is based of Return of the Jedi as it has a removable helmet and the tunic is tucked into the shoulders. But it as has a silver chain like the Star Wars costume. To fix this figure, I needed a lot more help than just building the Bandai model kit, which had an admittedly strange cape.

What I needed was a pro customizer: my buddy Joshua Izzo! He ended up slicing up an old Epic Force Darth Vader statue thing from the late 1990s and married parts of it to parts of the Hasbro figure. He made the hand interchangeable, fixed the cape, and then sculpted a whole bunch of detail like the tunic onto the figure. Add to that the Bandai kit head and paint the cape chain black and there you go! A close to perfect 6″ scale Darth Vader figure! And it only ended up costing around $60 and countless hours! Ha ha. Thank you, Hasbro. I also touched up the prequel Obi-Wan Kenobi figure with a robe from eBay and a scaled up head from Glassman that puts it in proportion to the body. I then gave it a much better paint job, although the older I get the harder it is to paint these tiny details. All in all, though, my revised figures make me much happier with the line and almost make me feel like I was designing toys again. I’d still rather all the toy companies just stop trusting their memories and start matching reference materials.

Note: I don’t want to have to watermark everything, I think it looks ugly. But if you’re going to repost any of these images or share them, please just give a link back to this page so people can see their original context. Thanks.

I think if you read a few of these articles you start to get a picture of the guy I used to be, specifically a toy designer. I haven’t been one now for nine years at this writing, but the industry still holds a great pull for me. Nothing else I’ve done has been as satisfying as thinking of something that doesn’t exist, and months later walking into any store in any town and holding that object in your hands (even if it didn’t always come out just quite like you thought it would). Don’t get me wrong, I love my current job and have had the opportunity to design many print ads and online videos. But working on a toy line is just a different animal. My one big regret is that I never went to work for any of the big companies like Kenner or Toy Biz or Hasbro, working on a signature line like X-Men or GI Joe.

One area I’ve dabbled in with a bit of freelance work, though, is package design. This is something I only really started doing at the end of my tenure in the toy industry, but the years that followed gave me a much larger education in design theory and composition in general. So now when I do find the time, it’s fun to create packaging and toys for products that never existed, especially trying to match a vintage aesthetic for well-known package designs. Creating custom toys has been around in the mainstream for about 25 years more or less. There are a lot fewer people worrying about custom packaging, probably because it is a different skill (and it is a skill that takes a lot of practice to be good)! There is A LOT of terrible toy packaging out there in the real world these days. Like advertising, the old ways of doing things before the ease of computers meant that you put in a lot of time thinking and reworking designs before they were final. And it showed! In recent times, you are seeing a bit of a reflection back to the nostalgia of the classic toy packaging, with Hasbro reviving it for both Star Wars and GI Joe toys line and Marvel even hiring artist John Tyler Christopher to recreate toys that never existed in that old style look (and he did a phenomenal job, by the way).

Now, some of these are meticulous recreations that took me many days to develop and some of them are basically digital doodles that just took a couple of hours. All of them are meant to be fun. The ease of use computers bring lets me crank these out at a furious pace, a luxury I wouldn’t have if it were still my full time job. I’ll lead off with one of my favorite mock-ups, the one that I spent the most time on by far: the Kenner Super Powers Fortress of Solitude playset.

I made this in 2013 as a wedding present for my good friend Daniel Pickett, uber collector and my partner on the Action Figure Insider website, to match his Tower of Darkness proof sheet. One of the most famous unproduced toys, the actual Tower of Darkness playset went into production just when the Super Powers toy line was cancelled. It was far enough along for packaging to get all the way to the printing proofs being pulled to check for any final flaws, and a few of those proof sheets made their way into the collecting community over the last decade. Daniel was able to snag not only the proof but also some blueprints for the playset and have the whole thing framed up nicely, so I though the perfect wedding gift would be an exact companion piece for a playset that never even was concepted. In a perfect world, I would have learned some 3D software and modeled the Fortress playset for the inset pictures. Instead, I ended up buying a lot of old Star Wars Hoth playsets on eBay and photographing them from every angle, then I chopped it all up in photoshop until I got the result I was looking for. Not perfect, but passable. Last step was to draw the front illustration in a style mimicking that of the original toy packaging, which was an exercise in frustration for a middling artist such as myself. All in all, though, I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. Daniel’s bride, Abby, sent me detailed pictures and measurements of his existing proof that I matched and then a colleague at work was nice enough to pull an actual proof from one of our printers, albeit not exactly a vintage Kodak one.

Fortress of Solitude proof sheet lying on a bed

This was more or less following up one of my first package homages, the fabled unproduced 4th Wave of Super Powers figures created for the article that I wrote with James Sawyer in 2004 that first revealed their existence to the world. The great Matt Cauley, Daniel Pickett, and I made a bunch of custom figures to illustrate the article and then I created the packaging for all of them. Lots more frustrating fun trying to draw well enough to compete the illusion, but it worked OK. To this day I see these popping up all over the web. Heck, Mattel even lifted the art I did for the Gold Superman for their homage figure!

I followed these up with more packaging concepts, this time a look at what it might have been like if the Super Powers Collection had followed the Star Wars look instead, using photography of the existing (at the time) movie actors associated with each character. I also threw in some cosplayers for later series; I wrote more about these designs here.

Over the years I made a few full boxed toy mock-ups, too. When Super 7 and Funko released the Kenner Alien line that never originally saw the light of day, I though it would be fun to use an old Kenner Star Wars playset and redress it, as Kenner enjoyed doing for many toy lines. It’s so cost effective to reuse stuff like this that who knows, maybe one day we’ll see this type of thing actually be produced.

Now, obviously I’m copying a good bit of the original design from the Star Wars packaging. But even so, Kenner actually produced two Alien toys before dropping the line over parent complaints: a board game and the infamous 12: Alien figure (click on the image at right for a bigger view of this box). You can see from these packages that a design aesthetic has been established; using monotone set photos and liberal use of the light blue, plus rounded corners on all boxes. Not terribly far off from Star Wars, but enough that it should be it’s own thing. If you look at the packaging that was created for this new line, you can see they ignore a few of these design cues. For fun, I even looked at the two figure card designs they did and made one that would have been more in line with the vintage Kenner stuff. Granted, 99% of the audience for this line has no memory of the original packaging and what Super 7 did is more than fine for the line (I mean, they could have just created their own thing entirely).

That brings up a good point, though: for a lot of the new “retro” lines that are meant to be homages to the toys of the 1970s and 1980s it feels like they are using Star Wars packaging as the one and only template. I’m not going to point any figures and really there isn’t anything at all wrong with that! Star Wars designs were amazingly great, which is why they’ve stood the test of time. It did make me wonder what I would have done, if I was in the position to create new art that is meant to feel old? Luckily, my buddy Jason Lenzi, co-owner of Bif Bang Pow!, is in the retro figure game. And his current lines like Twilight Zone have not only been knocking them out of the park, but also aren’t trying to copy any old designs with the packaging. When Bif Bang Pow! announced they were going to be making figures based on the 1980 Flash Gordon movie, I practically begged Jason to let me play around in that world. And he graciously agreed to humor me! 😉 Now, I knew whatever I came up with wouldn’t be the final design as they have their own very capable design team, but it was fun to play around in my spare time with a lot of design ideas meant to at least open up a few ways to approach the actual packaging. The only direction was to try and work in the iconic poster by Richard Amsel, in case they didn’t use actor likenesses for the printed materials.

The first thing I did was to research actual vintage toy line designs, something I never gave much thought to before past the ones I had tried to reproduce. And I found that the designs were far from being uniform and in fact varied quite a bit in the way they treated each license. What was really surprising to me was that I had expected most of the figures to be packaged on the left hand side of the card, but in fact MORE lines put the figure on the right side. The overall takeaway was that each line tried to distinguish itself from what had come before, probably to stand out more on shelves. This strategy feels very different than the toy lines of today!

Vintage toy packages

Keeping that in mind, I pretty much just went nuts with lots of variations, trying to find an iconic look that felt more old than new. I tried to pick up a lot of cues from the poster and soundtrack as those were some of the only official 1980 merchandise for the movie. Sure, I could go on and on about why I made some of these choices, how I thought using gold accents would be unlike any of the older lines, etc. But instead I’ll just show all the designs below. Final caveat: these are just explorations so there are a lot of rough edges to them (including using different existing figures to mock-up the new ones; the actual toys had not been sculpted when I was playing around). Had I taken any of them to final design I would have gone through a few rounds of refinement with the chosen concept.

Lots of design concepts from me

I have to give a shout-out again to Jason Lenzi for letting me play around. While I ended up too busy at my day job to do much more than what you see here, it was immense fun to dip my feet back into the pool. And the actual final packaging that Bif Bang Pow! is producing turned out great! I’m just happy a few of my touches made it into the mix. I even get a shout-out on the back of the card!

So you can see, I like messing around with this stuff in my free time. I have a few more samples on my DeviantArt page, and I’m sure I’ll have many more showing up there as time rolls on. In fact, just last week I was procrastinating instead of editing a video I was supposed to be working on when I realized that it would be really neat if the new Rocketeer figure from Funko could be just the first figure in a line of classic Pulp Heroes! Electric Tiki did a similar line of statues a few years ago, but I thought it would be neat if the packing reflected the pulp magazines of the 1930s and 1940s. So of course I spent a few hours batting out some designs. These are probably my roughest ones yet, due to there not being many vintage painted hi-res images floating out there of these characters, and I didn’t put a lot of thought into the text (“Fire of Doom”?!) but I was happy enough with how they turned out. And on that closing note, I’m off to create more stuff!

Every time one of these big budget superhero movies is announced there is a process of fear that fans go through. Will it get a good director? Will they get the casting right? And what is the costume going to look like? This last bit has probably cause more anxiety and grief than any other element. Because the costume of the superhero defines them. In large part, it is what accounts for their popularity, as it is the instant visual hook that initially draws in the reader, garishly jumping out from the cover of a comic book.

It’s odd then that this is the one area where filmmakers keep getting the genre wrong. Over and over we see either wild departures from the comic look, or bad attempts to translates what works on the page into something that has no business existing in real life. And don’t get me started on Warner Bros., who can’t seem to figure out the genre at all if Christopher Nolan isn’t involved. Most of the attempts fall somewhere in between, though. The one studio that seems to have really been nailing it, though, is the one that actually owns the characters: Marvel. Iron Man, Thor, and Hulk have all been very true to the spirit of the character, if not the exact letter. And the Avengers movie looks to continue the trend, with a pretty faithful Ultimate Hawkeye outfit along with Black Widow. Except for one small thing: Captain America, the ostensible star of the picture.

In a movie filled with characters in black leather and military gear, Cap stands out. Not in a good way, though. His Avengers outfit has been described as everything from pajamas to bad cosplay. His World War II outfit, while not remotely “comic accurate”, was a very good design. It felt appropriate enough for the period and cut a really nice figure onscreen. (Personally, I liked his more realistic “temporary” outfit even better). And in that movie the filmmakers even pointed out how ludicrous a straightforward adaptation of a comic book outfit looks on screen. It’s crazy how similar his new costume looks to the “fake” one!

So why is that? What is the difference between the stand alone films and the Avengers? I mean, they definitely share the same producers and concept artists. But they don’t share the same directors. And in my opinion this is the make or break element shared by all of the superhero movies that work or don’t work.

Let’s start by stating the obvious: you need a strong director with a singular vision to shepherd these films through what is a very arduous process even when everything goes right. Sometimes you get lucky and an unorthodox choice really meshes with the material (Jon Faverau on Iron Man, Kenneth Branagh on Thor, Richard Donner on Superman) and sometimes you don’t (Gavin Hood on Wolverine, Martin Campbell on Green Lantern, anyone who isn’t Dick Donner on Superman). But this is what’s needed to just make a good film. To make a good superhero film that satisfies everyone, you need more than that. You need a good designer.

That doesn’t mean just the guy behind the scenes sketching out storyboards. You need a director who is a good designer in their own right or at least one who has a very strong sense of design and can guide the artists who are creating this world. Now, there are many fantastic directors who are not necessarily good designers but are good at surrounding themselves with talent. I would put Steven Spielberg in this category along with Christopher Nolan. They are very much defined by their shooting styles, not by the designs of what is on the screen. However, they are able to collaborate so well with the designers that their vision is carried out exactly how they want it. But the actual look of things varies from picture to picture.

This is not the case for directors who have a very strong sense of their own style and are most often artists in their own right. Think of Terry Gilliam, Tim Burton, Walt Disney, Orson Welles, Jim Cameron, Ridley Scott, David Fincher. The look of their films, and every element in them, are clearly the vision of one person. The one director who possibly straddles this line is also the one most responsible for bringing back fantasy design into motion pictures: George Lucas.

Lucas was himself an artist, but apparently one who stopped creating art early on in his career. He did have a singular vision, however, and he did recognize both talent and good, clear design. I want to point out here that the word “designer” is not interchangeable with “artist”. Today especially, you have phenomenal artists working in the film industry. The advent of digital tools has allowed concept art to be as close to photo real as ever and the ability to change, revise, and complete a design takes a fraction of the time it used to. But I think even a lot of directors get confused by the good art they see into thinking it is also good design.

It is fitting that as I was writing this I found out that Ralph McQuarrie had passed away. One of the most important reasons for the initial success of Star Wars was that the entire universe was a cornucopia of great design. Every ship, every environment, and nearly every character in the film was instantly iconic. Studios and licensors keep wanting each new blockbuster film to sell the amount of toys that Star Wars does, but even now there has yet to be any movie that offers such great designs as the original Star Wars films do. And much of that is due to a handful of people, chiefly among them Ralph McQuarrie (and if you don’t know who he is I urge you to click on that link and go look at his artwork) and Joe Johnston.

I think the Star Wars prequels were hurt by not having designers of the caliber of McQuarrie and Johnston working on them. Arguably, Lucas had a better group of artists this time around. But their designs didn’t have the same kind of impact. Don’t get me wrong, there were incredible designs throughout all three prequels. But that has more to do with George’s vision and less to do with the designers (one exception is Iain McCaig, designer of Darth Maul, Watto, and many of Padmé’s signature outfits). Nearly all of the creatures are perfunctory, the same for most of the alien designs. Where is the Darth Vader? The Chewbacca? The Bantha? So many characters in the original trilogy are on screen for just a few moments, but they live long in the memory due to their design genius. The same goes for the spaceships, and the set interiors.

The other big difference between the original trilogy and the prequel designs is that few of the designs were “final”when they left the artist’s pen. The initial direction was handed over to very specialized designers who they adapted the concepts into their own style as they were fully realized into the real world. The amazing sets and environments were finalized by Norman Reynolds. The creatures and makeup were handled by Stuart Freeborn (with the stop motion ones translated by Phil Tippet). The costumes were designed by military historian John Mollo. All of these elements were necessary to go from a good idea to a great design. Just look at what Freeborn brought to Yoda’s design, to state just one example. These days it is too easy to go straight from the very detailed artist comp straight to the actual creature/costume/prop. And I think something is lost in the lack of translation. Just because art is pretty does not make it good design. And coming full circle, the Captain America film was directed by Joe Johnston, who is responsible for the final design of Boba Fett, the AT-ATs, the Snowspeeder, and the movie Rocketeer. This guy understands what it takes to have design work for the character.

And if you don’t have a director who has that eye for design you are left with nothing to latch on to and take away as you think back to the movie later. This does not necessarily make for a bad film. I think J.J. Abrams is one of those who does not have a strong design sense. I defy you to remember the details of any of the creatures or ships in the latest Star Trek film. But I think the film itself was very enjoyable. It just didn’t sell any toys. And unfortunately, I think Joss Whedon falls in to this category as well. He is obviously a gifted writer and he knows how to clearly lay out set pieces and ensemble casts. But is there anything in his past films that stands out as iconic? I mean, Firefly is fun but the costumes were all derivative western/steampunk. The spaceships were instantly forgettable (contrast that with even McQuarrie & Johnston’s work in TV’s Battlestar Galactica, easily remembered 30 years later).

That Captain America’s costume went through testing and on to film looking like that is insane. Normally, I would be withholding judgement until seeing it on film, but it looks no less goofy in the trailers than it does in still pictures. I’m going to assume that up until the final stages his ears were showing, as all of the licensing art and even some of the toys still have his ears sticking out. But even minor corrections to this design would have grounded the character and integrated him better with the rest of the cast, instead of looking like he popped in from some 80s tv movie. Heck, it already looks better once it starts getting dirty and he loses the cowl. But it could be better from the get go. Check out the picture below to see a few of the changes I made in photoshop in about 20 minutes.

First, drop the cowl if it can’t be one piece, and expose the neck (why is the toughest character the only one whose head is unexposed?). This takes away all that bunching fabric and gives him a cleaner profile. Add a thin chin strap to further define Chris Evans’ jawline. Use a heavier mesh fabric like the Navy Seals assault uniforms to give it more of a texture and some rigid shapes (you know, like Hawkeye has right next to him); it looks like he’s wearing some kind of rayon cloth. Lose those crappy silver highlights on the shoulders that do nothing but break the flow of his silhouette. And de-emphasize the overly sculpted star pin his chest. I also changed the shape of his underarm sections of white- they should be angled downward. At their current angle it makes his shoulder look tiny. Finally, the entire outfit is way too bright (and the helmet color doesn’t even match the rest of the costume!). A dark blue-black will still keep it looking patriotic but not in a clownish way. Desaturate the reds and give him normal gloves and boots while you’re at it.

And the film itself looks fantastic; I’ll be one of the first in line to see it. I have nothing but good feelings about the entertainment value I’ll get out of this. Look, it’s not like other comic fans haven’t fallen into the trap that Joss has. I get that he wants this to look as close to the comics as possible. But Captain America more than any other character doesn’t wear a costume. He wears a uniform. He is a soldier. All the design cues should be coming from the military, not the comics. And the leader of this motley group of heroes shouldn’t be wearing motley himself.

Update – 3/2015!

First the uniform for Cap in The Winter Soldier and now the latest upgrade for Avengers: Age of Ultron pretty much fixes everything I wrote about above! Way to go, Marvel!

“You take out ‘of Mars,’ you don’t tell where he came from? That’s what makes it unique!” a former Disney executive said. “They choose to ignore that, and the whole campaign ends up meaning nothing. It’s boiled down to something no one wants to see.– ‘John Carter’: Disney’s Quarter-Billion-Dollar Movie Fiasco”

So in a couple of weeks we’re going to see the long awaited (and I mean long awaited!) debut of both the first big-screen adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs “John Carter of Mars” books, and the first live-action film from noted Pixar director Andrew Stanton. Sadly, most of the people who might be the target audience for this film probably have zero awareness of either of those two facts. And that is unfortunately only a very small part of the utter failure of Disney to market this movie.

But before I talk about the marketing muddle, first I need to address a few issues with the movie itself that did the marketing team no favors in my eyes. Let me preface all of this by saying that I haven’t seen any of the film past the trailers and featurettes released, and that I’m assuming that it is a good solid film based on Stanton’s track record. Word trickling out so far has been good to great, from the journalists who have seen it so far. I’m not really a fan of the character, having never read any of the books. However, it has permeated pop culture enough that I am fairly aware of the popular image of John Carter & co. And although Taylor Kitsch may be a great actor, he just doesn’t seem right for the part of a Civil War veteran described as being a 6’2″, steel-eyed, clean shaven, man in his 30s. Kitsch is just too “current”, he seems every bit a boyish young man of the 21st century. This part needs a Sean Connery, a Harrison Ford, a Gregory Peck. A “man”. And a man who not only has a steely resolve, but a sense of humor. A swashbuckler. That is not Kitsch.

His female counterpart, Dejah Thoris, needs to be the opposite. Tough, but sensuous. Voluptuous. Striking. I’ve heard good things about Lynn Collins’ performance, but like Kitsch she seems eminently forgettable. Good casting for Dejah would have been Angelina Jolie, circa 2003. Not because Jolie is necessarily perfect for the role, but that combination of allure and otherworldlyness that she exuded is what the role needs. Both parts should be an alpha male and an alpha female. But we didn’t get that, regrettably. How Disney bankrolled such a huge budget with no stars is puzzling, but maybe they expected the same luck they had with Pirates of the Caribbean to strike again.

The other thing that really bugs me are the design choices for nearly everything. Stanton seems to have fallen into that very modern trap of needed to make everything in the film “real” and grounded in some sort of explainable reality. So the Tharks (four-armed green men) are equated to the thin, sinewy Masai warriors, both being desert-dwelling societies. And the Martian landscape itself is a slightly modified version of Utah’s Monument Valley, with no red vistas to be found. Since Burroughs described Dejah’s people as “red-skinned”, and they found that actually coloring the skin looked problematic, Stanton chose to cover them in red tattoos to explain away the reference (which is odd that he picked that to be so literal about but ignore the descriptions of Tharks or John Carter himself).

The creature design falls prey to nearly all creature design cliches that we’ve seen since the advent of CGI; either animals that are made to look as if they could actually exist, or ones so fantastic that they couldn’t be made without CGI (see nearly everything ever designed by Neville Page). Hey, even the Star Wars prequels fell into this trap. As a kid I was fascinated by the Tauntauns and dewbacks, and Wampas and Rancors of the original trilogy. I don’t think there is a single creature in the prequels that inspires any love (much less countless toys). I look at the banner shown below and at first glance it looks like a guy riding an elephant, with a giant frog next to him. You can barely tell the middle figure is an alien, and almost assuredly can’t tell it has four arms. And the “hot chick” is so far back she may as well be just another guy. With the uninspired costumes, creatures, and landscapes, this may as well be Prince of Persia 2 instead of a timeless space fantasy.

Sidenote: Paramount Studios tried to get their version of John Carter off the ground for about a decade being letting the rights lapse, first with director Kerry Conran (the failure of his “Sky Captain & the World of Tomorrow” probably killed his chances) and later Robert Rodriguez and John Favreau, who went straight to Iron Man after it all fell through. Conran’s version, at least, would have shared similar designs as Stanton’s does, but really amped up the fantasy element instead of grounding it in “realism”. Check out the presentation reel he made:

And that right there nails what this movie is not being promoted as, but should be: space fantasy. It is NOT science fiction…but the marketing team seems to think it is. The books that the film is based on were written 100 years ago, literally! Countless movies have stolen generously from them, and audiences have seen these concepts many times before. So even though the stories may be somewhat well known to a small readership, the general public has no idea who these characters are, what they should look like, and the context of what was “fantastic” in 1912. Why on Earth would anyone try and make this thing “realistic”?!? Why wouldn’t you reimagine those parts that were stolen and give us a version we aren’t expecting? Tarzan has never been faithful to those (outdated) stories, so why does this need to be? Before I go into the terrible promotion of John Carter, just move your mouse over the image below. That’s the difference of how the publisher sold the books (with seminal art by Frank Frazetta) vs how Disney is selling the movie.

The biggest marketing sin is right up front: nothing about the marketing materials (posters, trailers, title) tells you ANYTHING about this movie, other than it’s some kind of science fiction film. It doesn’t tell you it’s from the visionary directory of Finding Nemo and Wall-E, it doesn’t tell you it’s based on the groundbreaking, influential books by the creator of Tarzan. It doesn’t scream Romance! Action! Adventure! No, instead they dropped all mention of Mars from the title in favor of the lead character’s boring name. I can’t imagine being excited as an eight year old wanted to see a movie called “Luke Skywalker”. But the name thinghas beenhashed over enough. I’ll just say that when everybody’s first reaction to hearing the new title is some form of rebellion, it should be evident that you’ve made a mistake. As I pointed out above, the posters leave much to be desired: no custom logo for the movie, just an average looking typeface (but one that would be dead on for a cerebral sci-fi film). Horribly desaturated color palette. The lead character is tiny (this is almost worse on another big piece where Carter is upstaged by two uninspired ape/mole creatures on the set of Attack of the Clones) and bored looking. It’s sad when the two best pieces of promotion are a poster made by a niche company for a midnight giveaway and a fan made trailer that is 50 times better than any “official” one put together by Disney.

It’s funny that every film like this aspires to be Star Wars (especially in the eyes of the studio execs and accountants) but no one looks to the lessons of Star Wars when they are making these films. Star Wars (and I’m talking Episode 4: A New Hope, here, not the prequels) was a fantasy film through and through. There was no explaining how so many aliens could exist, or how they knew English, or how the space ships worked…they all just did. And the designs were iconic, with attention paid more for impact and “cool factor” than how “real” they might seem. The casting was either mainly unknowns who totally embodied the roles, or gifted veterans to lend gravitas. And every set piece was fantastic in the truest sense of the word. Nothing about Star Wars felt pedestrian. It felt earnest, and exciting, but every where you looked was something you had never seen before. Hey, Disney: I’ve seen Utah.

No, the lesson filmmakers take away is that George made everything worn and rusty as if it existed in a “found universe”. Which was a brilliant conceit on his part to ground the fantasy. It was not the ends in itself. George also understood how to sell his movie to the public, as a space serial. As wonder. As “fun”. Look at the original Star Wars posters, and you can see where George understood the power in those Frazetta illustrations. And why is this movie rated PG-13? It has DISNEY on the title! From on of the founders of Pixar! People tend to overlook something else that made Star Wars a massive hit. It was a movie for kids. Kids who turned out in droves, and brought the family along. Kids who grew up spending money on Star Wars and buying, buying, buying Star Wars toys. And boy, George knew how to sell toys. Lots and lots of toys. And I keep seeing reference to Disney making John Carter in the first place to be a licensing powerhouse tentpole for the studio. Except…where are the toys?

In fact, where is any John Carter merchandise? See, the movie opens in a few weeks and the industry rule of thumb is that most movie-based toy lines will have made 60% of their sales before the movie opens. Heck, Avengers doesn’t open until the Summer and those toys are currently on shelves everywhere. But nothing for John Carter. At all. This, I just can’t understand. Sure, sure, I get that Disney may be gun shy after the debacle of Prince of Persia, a movie that sold few tickets and almost no toys. And that was followed by an even bigger failure in their eyes, Tron:Legacy. It bombed with most audiences, and the toys were lackluster peg warmers that didn’t even make it to the planned second series. Why would Disney take another chance on these toys just sitting around?

Well, maybe because this movie is supposed to be Disney’s “Star Wars”! The stories that set the mold. And it has no toys. How are kids going to get excited about a movie that gives them no ownership after they leave the theater? What plants the idea of John Carter and his amazing world in their heads to drag Mom & Dad to opening day? How are they going to beg to go back for a second showing without having spent their afternoons playing “John Carter” with their action figures with little Ricky down the street? Well, they’re not. You know why? Because thanks to Star Wars, every license is a blockbuster waiting to happen in the eyes of the studio. George Lucas famously gave up an increase in his fee in exchange for the merchandising rights to Star Wars. No studio exec will ever let the possibility of giving away the golden goose happen again, for fear of their job.

So the licensing fees for a potential tentpole film are astronomical. If the budget is huge then it goes up even more. And when toy manufacturers, themselves burned by all the Trons and Prince of Persias and Terminator:Salvations don’t want to risk that much money on what may seem to be an iffy prospect, the studio opts for no toys to be made rather than lower their price. You know what? To sell this movie they should have given away the rights for next to nothing. They should have held back Pixar toys as a package deal with John Carter. They should have paid their existing partners to crank out John Carter toys to stand as free advertising in every toy store, Walmart, and Target months before the movie came out. But now it’s too late. I truly hope in spite of all of this that John Carter is a big hit. That Andrew Stanton hits it out of the park. That it becomes something more than a one-off, destined to be a cult favorite one day. But I remember another film based on a pulp hero that Disney mismarketed and had no toys. And I know the Rocketeer had no sequels, either.

That’s right, true believer! Mattel’s toy line of Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars lives again! And it’s a crazy tale that will Thunderball you over with its twists and turns. But first, let me lay down a little background on you for those not already in the know:

It all started with a phone call. In 1983 Mattel, the largest toy company in the world, contacted Marvel Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter. Having recently lost their bid to make toys of the DC Comics characters to Kenner Toys, Mattel immediately went to Marvel for the chance at a competing toy line. Shooter was intrigued by the talks, but Mattel did have one condition: they wanted a big event to base the toys on in lieu of any TV or film support. The specifics weren’t important as long as it was called “Secret Wars”- two words that Mattel had found tested well with adolescent boys. And so the tongue-twisting “Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars” was born. Although Mattel had input into the mini-series’ direction and Marvel did everything they could to facilitate new toys (creating new characters, changing existing character’s costumes, and highlighting vehicles and play environments), Mattel ultimately used very little specifics from the Secret Wars comics itself.

Roger Sweet, the creator of Masters of the Universe at Mattel, was responsible for oversight of the new line. “I had been put in charge of managing the design creation of the 1983 He-Man / Masters Of The Universe line, and continued to do so through the 1987 line.”, said Roger. “But, in about 1984, I was also given responsibility for managing the design creation of the Marvel Secret Wars line. Mattel had gone to Marvel in the hope of picking up the Marvel line, and did so. Previously, Mattel had been to DC Comics in the hope of acquiring the DC license. But, Mattel lost out to Kenner. By Mattel Marketing and upper management, the Marvel Secret Wars line was viewed as a “flanker brand” to Masters. In other words, it was considered as a secondary brand to pick up additional male action sales for Mattel, but while cutting little into Masters’ sales. That is why the Marvel figures were designed smaller and far less muscular than the Masters figures.” So these figures were intentionally “dumbed down” to not only save production costs, but to literally be a lesser product to not compete with MOTU, but still pick up subsidiary sales, much like Marvel’s SuperHeroSquad does today (of course, we still see this theory in effect today at Mattel, with lines like JLU). This also explains how a smaller company like Kenner got the DC license instead of Mattel; because they were willing to put more money and effort into it.

Secret Wars figures were articulated only at the shoulders, hips and neck and had no special “action feature” like Kenner’s Super Powers or Mattel’s own Masters of the Universe. Most of the figures shared one of 3 basic bodies, with only minimal custom detail tooled for each character. This also meant that there would be no characters with unusual bodies that couldn’t be reused or that were oversized and would need unique packaging. Mr. Sweet explains how the direction of the line was decided: “I was quite familiar with the Marvel Comics characters. I had grown up with some of them, and had read about them in the Marvel comics. Marvel provided very little actual support, but would have if Mattel had needed it. My design group and Marketing handled the selection of the Marvel figures to go into the Mattel Marvel line, and the creation of the other product like vehicles and playsets.”

The first series to hit store shelves featured the customary stalwart Marvel characters along with some new fan favorites getting toys for the very first time. Roger Sweet’s design group, “along with Marketing, selected the figures. They were selected largely because they were the main known Marvel good and bad guys at that time, or appealed to someone at Mattel”. It’s safe to say that colorful characters and ones that were easy to produce also played a factor in figure selection.

Series 2 hit shelves in early 1985, but by this time the line was already ceasing production overseas. Whereas the first series featured characters that all played a big role in the Secret Wars comic, nearly all of the characters in this next series didn’t appear in Secret Wars at all! Even during production then, some concepts never made it to shelves. “There was one vehicle that I created and designed that was very neat. And, I commissioned an outside designer to do a beautiful full-color styled illustration of it. The vehicle had one figure sitting inside a cockpit and another figure standing on the back manning a machine gun. But the vehicle later was deleted in the Mattel visual design department and replaced by a much less appealing vehicle of another type.” laments Mr. Sweet.

Series 2- Falcon, Hobgoblin, Baron Zemo, Black Spider-Man, Daredevil

Unfortunately the toys were not a giant hit on the scale of He-Man and his pals and within just 2 years of launch, the Secret Wars line was already in clearance bins at toy store around the country. The cancellation of the line was so abrupt that three figures for the third series were already in production. Rather than destroy these toys, they were released in Europe only as there were not enough of them to distribute to all the American markets.

European Figures- Constrictor, Electro, Iceman

Once again, the only three new characters never appeared in the Secret Wars comics, and in fact they were not even very well known or popular in the comics of the day. The cost cutting could readily be seen by this point: outside of new heads, each of their bodies are recycled from earlier figures with no added details. Like much of the other characters, this would be the first time any of them had been made into toys. Unlike the other series, these three are by far the rarest pieces in the entire line, and even at the time of their release were hard to find if you didn’t like in Europe.

And that’s where it ended, as a pale shadow of other contemporary lines, yet the only glimpse fans had of their favorite characters in plastic during Marvel’s heyday. But was it really the end?

Well, apparently Mattel had further plans for these stalwart heroes and heroines. Yep, now it can be told: there were TWO more assortments planned and it seems that they were a good ways into production when the line was cancelled. We’ve done a little detective work coupled with the find of some artwork for those final waves to bring you the whole story. The artwork in and of itself is quite a find. This isn’t concept art, but actual production art to be used for one of the most overlooked items in the Secret Wars saga: the lenticular shields used by all of the figures! Each figure came with four lenticular inserts- one in the shield and three in a baggie. The inserts showed unique scenes on front and back pertaining to each character; some of them showed secret identities, some showed a demonstration of their powers, and most showed them in battle with other characters that had figures so kids could act out the mayhem on their own.

And that fact is key to figuring out what was going to be made: no shield produced featured characters that were NOT a part of the Secret Wars line. So looking at the artwork created for the unmade figures’ shields we can see that the characters that were previously unknown are: Mr. Fantastic, the Abomination, Annihilus, Thunderball, and Dazzler! Yes, as crazy as it seems (and really, this entire line-up is pretty crazy) the first female figure that the toy line was going to have was not Phoenix, not Invisible Girl, not Scarlet Witch, but Dazzler. Oh kay.

But maybe she wasn’t going to be the first. There were two more characters featured on the shield artwork that hadn’t been seen before, but didn’t have full set of art themselves: the Hulk and Mystique. And this is really the final piece of the puzzle, because some of the existing characters seen on the artwork include Iceman, Electro, and Constrictor: the 3 “European” Secret Wars figures. If we assume that Mattel’s plans going forward were to mirror the second wave, and offer 5 new characters with some re-released older figures in each assortment, then it seems apparent that wave three would have actually been Electro, Iceman, Constrictor, The Hulk, and Mystique. The Hulk has long been reported by multiple sources to have been sculpted, and Mystique would have made a very striking, colorful figure. Especially since the prevailing mantra of the time was “girls don’t sell” in the action figure world, having an “alien” looking girl just might help counter that wisdom. It also makes sense why only three of them were released to Europe: these figures only needed tooling for new heads, and their bodies were straight repaints of earlier figures and therefore were cheap to produce and recoup costs on what was already in production. But tooling new bodies like the Hulk or Mystique would cost much more, giving them no chance to make their money back unless they were released wide in a big market like the U.S.

The fourth wave probably wasn’t that far into production, with most of the artwork not even having been inked yet, let alone colored and formatted for lenticular prints (and that also explains why there is finished artwork so far out; the lenticular process took more time than normal printing schedules). But we can see how Dazzler would have been meant reuse the Mystique body, Abomination the Hulk body, and the rest reusing and repainting existing bodies with maybe new wings for Annihilus and a new neck or arms for Mr. Fantastic. (UPDATE: it is now known that at least the Hulk and Abomination WERE sculpted and reside in the Mattel’s vaults! Hopefully one day we’ll see pictures of these long-awaited figures.)

Of course, we haven’t talked yet about WHO exactly drew this artwork. Earlier series had art by comic pros such as Mike Zeck and Bob Layton. But Mattel also had their own stable of artists that they used for lines like Masters of the Universe. Some of them were established comic artists, too, like the great Mike Sekowsky, who drew some alternate Mr. Fantastic pieces, and Pete Von Sholly, who drew the Thunderball artwork. But the majority of these pieces were handed over to a young artist who was then doing a bang-up job on the MOTU mini-comics. An artist who would go on to establish himself as having not only a distinctive art style, but also a unique voice that would remake how people saw superhero animation. Yes, these images would have been the first professional published superhero art by Bruce Timm, who confirmed it for us himself. “Holy crap, I’d completely forgotten about that stuff “, said Bruce. “It was so long ago, my memory’s pretty hazy, but these were the only pieces I did for the Secret Wars line — and yes, I guess this was my first “professional” spandex/superhero art”. Another artist who worked on the line remembers that “the line was cancelled while they were working on it, but [I] really don’t have more memory of it. Bruce came in at the end, which is why I don’t believe any of his were ever produced.” According to him, they were specifically commissioned by Mattel to create this final art. His notes on the last two assignments character assignments reads: Abomination, Dazzler, Mr. Fantastic, Annihilus, Hulk, Glider (1st of two), and Mystique, Vision, Thunderball. Color was never produced for these two batches, so they got a kill fee for that aspect. This is the only mention of the Vision, as no artwork involving him has shown up anywhere (it is possible that the art for the Vision was never started,with the cancellation of the line happening before that point and much of the artwork in pencil only).

Hero Shields

Dazzler

Dazzler vs Annihilus

Dazzler vs Constrictor

Dazzler vs Villains

Dazzler vs bars

Dazzler vs Abomination

Mr Fantastic

Mr Fantastic vs Abomination

Mr Fantastic vs Doom Roller

Mr Fantastic vs Electro

Mr Fantastic vs Villains

Mr Fantastic vs Abomination (Sekowsky

Mr Fantastic vs Hobgoblin (Sekowsky)

Mr Fantastic (Sekowsky)

Villain Shields

The Abomination

Abomination vs building

Abomination vs Captain America

Abomination vs wall

Abomination vs Hulk

Abomination vs Wolverine

Annihilus

Annihilus vs Hulk

Annihilus vs Base

Annihilus vs Captain America

Annihilus vs Dazzler

Annihilus vs Daredevil

Annihilus vs Spider-Man

Thunderball

Thunderball vs bike

Thunderball vs Captain America

Thunderball vs helicopter

Thunderball vs Spider-Man

Thunderball vs Iceman

Thunderball vs wall

Bruce didn’t just draw the figure’s shields, though. Also included in his artwork were some new gliders (like the Doom Star and Star Dart) and “Battle Board” art that appears to be tied to new “mini-rig” type vehicles that probably would have been packaged with a figure or two for a deluxe package.

Battle Boards

Iron Man

Captain America

Constrictor

Daredevil

Mystique

Spider-Man

Electro

Dr. Doom

Wolverine

Gliders

Mystique

Spider-Man

With this great new look at what might have been we can only step back and marvel at how amazing, fantastically bizarre this toy line really was. To this day we do not yet have figures of Baron Zemo 2 and Dazzler, and Constrictor is only just showing up now. But the likelihood of turning up actual sculpts of the unproduced toys seems to be pretty slim. According to a source “in the know”, there is nothing in the Mattel archives concerning Secret Wars. Apparently Mattel kept terrible records back then and anything pre-1995 is kind of a lost cause.

There is a copy of Dr. Doom’s original weapon (?) that was not included with the figure in one of their display cases. And the rumors swirl that Hulk and The Thing were sculpted. But unless the prototypes were still on someone’s desk who has worked there all these years, or in a retired designer’s drawer hidden away from the world, it is doubtful we’ll ever know just what could have been had Mattel stuck it out for just one more year back in 1985.

When I first started collecting toys back around 1990 I would run into other collectors sporadically (this being in the dark days before the internet collecting community at large had coalesced around USENET, for the most part). One way I would know that they were die-hard toy hunters was that they had had “The Dream”. Usually this centered around Star Wars, but every collector who I talked with had it at one point or another after they had become totally immersed in hunting down old toys.

Make no mistake, The Dream never involved new toys. It always started with you being in a store (most likely a store that no longer existed, frequently a department store that still had a toy section) and as you wander through the store you find all the toys you wish were still there brand new on the shelves. And tons of them: the first 12-back Star Wars figures, all MOC. The original run of Master of the Universe. The 3rd wave of Super Powers. Maybe a Bionic Bigfoot, or Micronauts vehicle peeking around the endcap. And even better, toys that were never made! A vintage Tie Bomber! A Bantha playset! A whole rack of He-Ro figures!

Well, I didn’t have that dream often, but I did have it. Up until about 12 years ago, that is. And then it went away, probably because nothing was hard to find anymore thanks to eBay, and everything you wish had been made in the 1970s was now being made in the present day. But last night, I had the dream again! Sorta…

I dreamt that I was buying Marvel Universe figures. And not just the ones I’ve been passing up, but ones we haven’t seen yet, like the Lizard, and Juggernaut, and Wendigo. And even better, there were a lot of DC characters there too: Superman, Joker, Killer Croc, Blue Devil. All sculpted just like the MU figures. Now, I don’t know what this means. I’m in the process of dumping most of my toy collection for good, and I surely don’t need anything new outside of DCUC to take my money these days.

But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t do some mental calculations about just how much it would cost to catch up on the MU figures as soon as I woke up…

Update – 2014: Of course, now I own about 85% of all the Marvel Universe figures! Go here to check out just how many of these things have been made so far at Daniel Lynch’s awesome MU checklist! The packaging alone on this line is just amazing, with top-level Marvel artists creating custom illustrations specifically for the toy line. You just don’t see that any more! Here’s who did what:

I haven’t done one of these posts in awhile, but I’ve been rediscovering stuff I’ve been sent over the years that never made it to shelves and thought that it was high time that some of it been seen.

This little piece was sent to me by an anonymous soul who has dropped a few other bombshells on me in the past. It looks like it was going to be sort of a prop of the 70s JLA Satellite Headquarters that would have sculpted details and cutaway sections that lit up from inside like a shadowbox. I have no idea when this was supposed to be made, or how far along it got in the pipeline. I only know that I’ve never heard about it actually being solicited, and neither has Julius Marx. So at this point, I’m guessing it’s dead (I was sent this a year or so ago).

Like the previous entry on the BK Lord of the Rings figures, these were pitched to Burger King in 2001 as a tie-in to the then-airing X-Men Evolution cartoon.

The earlier idea of figure packs was such a hit internally, when the X-Men license rolled around it was thought that the perfect “never been done before” concept would be 14 two-packs(!), each containing hero and villain figures. This is the overall “beauty shot” of all the figures together – each figure would have it’s own unique action feature and the pairs would be somewhat appropriate to the characters, i.e. Professor X & Magneto, Wolverine & Sabretooth, etc.

Sadly, the powers that be at Burger King didn’t see the fun in making the “same old figure toys” and instead opted for a rival concept of static figurines that came with an interactive CD. This is something I would see over and over while designing toys; people who didn’t like toys making decisions regardless of kids or collectors or even sales. While Jack in the Box later made a nice set of Justice League figures, this would have been a nice chance to own a lot of the more obscure characters that never saw toy representation.

One note: some of the designs (Boom Boom, Wolfsbane, etc) were based off the comics and not the show due to only a list of names for the upcoming characters was provided to BK and not character art. These would have been corrected had the concept made it to production. Much of the art shown is the work of the great Jeff Parker, Michael Smith, and David Hudnut! For more unseen X-Men Evolution art, go check out designer Steve Gordon’s great website!